Artverona Ncontemporary 2020

This is a painting by Cristiano Tassinari, and what strikes me is its collage-like feel, how the artist combines different elements on the canvas. The texture is really interesting here – you can see how Tassinari layers the paint, sometimes thin and transparent, other times thick and opaque. There’s a definite physicality to the medium, like he's wrestling with the paint, trying to find the image within the process. Look at the bottom of the canvas, there’s this dripping, almost like the painting is melting before our eyes. It's really emotionally charged. There's something of Francis Bacon in here, in the way that Tassinari uses the source image, playing with representation and abstraction. Ultimately, it's this ambiguity, this refusal to settle on one fixed meaning, that makes it so compelling. It's like art is an ongoing conversation, a constant back-and-forth between different ideas and interpretations.